The Orientalist and the Ghost (10 page)

EVERY MORNING I
cook porridge for Julia. And every morning my granddaughter pads to the kitchen, sleepy and sloe-eyed, in school uniform and stockinged feet, to watch the bubbling alchemy of oats and milk on the stove. The child is good as gold before she leaves for school, as if her rebellious alter ego has a lie-in while the rest of her washes, dresses and gears up for the day. No matter how bothersome my spectral guests the night before, I never fail to rise for porridge duty at quarter past seven. The wholesome nourishment of oats and a few morning pleasantries: this is my contribution to Julia’s upbringing before she dashes out of the door.

As Julia spooned up her piping hot breakfast this morning, I wondered what she’d thought of Malaysia. Had she felt any connection to the land of durians and rafflesia and Chinese ancestors? Were there any
genealogical
stirrings, echoes of recollection in the portion of her DNA returned to its country of origin? Nervous of triggering painful memories, I’d avoided speaking of Malaysia before. But as several months had passed, and the worst of the grieving was over, I tentatively asked my granddaughter if she’d liked it over there. To my relief there were no tears or distress.

Julia licked her spoon and said: ‘Malaysia was very hot. I had jet lag and couldn’t sleep for weeks. Madame Tay took me to do outdoor t’ai chi in the park to make me sleepy. In the park there was this pond with hundred-year-old turtles in it. I was stroking one of the turtles and it bit my finger off.’ Julia showed me the forefinger of her left hand, severed above the topmost joint. Really. Hundred-year-old carnivorous turtles. What a lively imagination she has! Adam says the finger was slammed in a door.

‘Did your brother like it there?’

‘Dunno. Adam had diarrhoea and prickly heat. He had jet lag too, but he didn’t want to do t’ai chi. Said it was girly.’

‘Did you get on with Ayah?’

‘She was scary! She nagged Mum like she was a child.’

‘Oh yes, she’s an old battleaxe, isn’t she?’

Madame Tay was my daughter’s ayah for sixteen years – an ill-chosen surrogate mother who taught Frances to be scornful of her English father. I’d have sacked the conniving witch, if Frances hadn’t loved her so.

‘Mum reckoned she’s going to die soon anyway.’

‘Julia. You mustn’t talk like that!’

Heaven forbid! The thought of Madame Tay levitating about my council flat gives me the screaming habdabs. Let us pray that her potions of belladonna and bat’s gonads help her outlive me by years.

After scraping her bowl clean Julia went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and metal brace, a task she performs with such vigour the bristles of her toothbrush are splayed flat within a couple of weeks. After she’d rinsed, gargled and spat, Julia grabbed her satchel, shouted, ‘ ’Bye, Granddad,’ and tore out of the door. I watched from the kitchen window as she crossed the estate, tall and raw-boned, with a gangling, clumsy stride (she must have inherited that gaucheness from her father; Frances was very graceful at that age). I watched my granddaughter lope away, knowing she will return to me tonight a different girl. Resentful and sullen. A stranger. Outside my flat Julia belongs to the estate. To the smashed-up telephone boxes and stolen cars. Until she straggles home again my granddaughter belongs to whatever claims her. And I fear there are many things eager to claim the likes of a twelve-year-old girl.

At least I don’t have to worry about Adam running wild. Though that’s not to say the boy’s not a worry. It’s not normal for a fifteen-year-old boy never to speak, not have any friends and rarely go outdoors. Yesterday, returning from his weekly trip to the library, Adam came home reeling under the weight of an 18-inch black-and-white TV. I’d never owned a television before
and
wasn’t sure if I wanted the so-called ‘opium of the masses’ in my living room. But keen for Adam to have a hobby other than reading I said,
You can put that on the sideboard
. Adam had cleaned out his post-office savings to make the junk-shop purchase, and at first I feared he’d been fleeced. He sculpted an aerial out of a wire coat hanger, then spent half an hour twisting it about until there was a picture decent enough to watch. The first programme we saw was a quiz show (which, owing to the on-screen blizzard, seemed to have been filmed on location in Siberia). I enjoyed the quiz very much, and when Charles Dulwich came strutting along, scandalized by our new acquisition (
I say! What the devil’s that? Where’ve you hidden the projector …?
), I was so engaged in the number puzzles and the witticisms of the host, I ignored the peeved Resettlement Officer until he went away.

When our nicotine-stained angel came home she gave a whoop of delight and sat down on the sofa in her puffa jacket. I’d cooked sausages and mash for dinner, and we ate with our plates on our laps, spellbound by the snowy landscape of the TV screen. In the flickering monochrome light I could see the fluctuating emotions on my grandchildren’s faces: Julia giggling at every comic moment, widening her eyes at the slightest bit of dramatic suspense; Adam blushing, eyes downcast during romantic clinches, smiling darkly at tragic happenings. For three hours we sat in the living room, suffused in the glow of cathode rays. And despite my initial reservations, I am quite looking forward to the
same
again tonight. How nice it was to have the three of us spending time together, like a family.

After I’d lied to Sergeant Abdullah to protect the Lim sisters, I was certain that Detective Pang had reported me. I steeled myself for the tap on the shoulder, the summons to the police hut. But none came. Why was my day of reckoning not forthcoming? Had Detective Pang decided my storytelling was for a good cause? The best way to eliminate my suspense was to ask the man himself.

As Detective Pang had warned me not to approach him in public, there were few opportunities to talk to him. But about a week after our encounter in the police hut I saw him alone, dragging a billy goat by the horn along a deserted trail. The goat was stamping its hooves and kicking up a spindrift of dust, and the detective was hitting the struggling creature with a bamboo carpet-beater. The goat dropped to his knees and Pang’s thrashings became so vicious I thought the bamboo carpet-beater would snap. Why was the detective putting so much effort into the cruel performance when there were no witnesses to his imitation of a villager? I took a deep breath to shout his name, but the cry froze in my throat as a man wielding a broom ran over to him. I recognized the man, for Ah Yeop was a known Communist sympathizer (and latterly one of my spectral interlopers, forever bragging about the three sons he sacrificed to the Malayan Races Liberation Army and their collected acts of terrorism). When I saw
Ah
Yeop I knew my chance to find out why Detective Pang hadn’t reported me had passed. I watched instead as the Min Yuen member and undercover spy beat the goat unconscious, then hauled the creature away by its hind legs.

On rainy days the villagers couldn’t go rubber tapping. They could do little more than shake their fists at the disobliging sky and curse the day’s lost wages. It was on such a day of rain and idleness that I filched a heavy padlock and took it over to Evangeline’s hut, dashing through the drowned village in thonged slippers, through crashing sheets of rain. The torrential rampage made a mud slide of the path, and more than once I slipped and soiled my trousers. My umbrella sprang a leak, and by the time I reached Evangeline’s hut I was woefully drenched.

I peered through the wire netting of the window to make sure I had the correct hut. Grace was sitting on an upturned beer crate and sucking her thumb, and Evangeline’s head was bowed as she worked at a Singer sewing machine, inching a length of fabric under the quick-stabbing needle, her foot tapping the pedal as the bobbin of thread spun round. Evangeline made her living as a seamstress, going from door to door collecting clothes for mending and taking orders for made-to-measure garments. But clothes were not a priority for the impoverished villagers and Evangeline had a hard time making ends meet. When Grace saw me she took her thumb out of her mouth and cooed.
Evangeline
glanced up from her sewing, surprised, then self-conscious. When she opened the door her face was lined with irritation. I shut my broken umbrella and regretted not asking permission to visit. The rain pelting the zinc roof was loud enough to wake the dead, and we shouted to communicate.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in English.

‘I’ve brought a padlock for your door, to stop your sister from escaping again. I’ve brought tools too, and I can fix the brackets if you like.’

I lifted the sturdy padlock from my bag and held it up. Evangeline swung the door wider and I stepped inside, shivering and dripping on the beaten-earth floor.

‘I’ll get you a towel,’ said Evangeline.

The sisters lived in the most ascetic of huts. Bamboo-mat bedding and wooden crates were the only furniture, and the sewing machine dominated the room. As Evangeline rummaged about in a tea chest at the back of the hut, I said hello to Grace, who smiled and slurped on her thumb. Evangeline dug out a threadbare towel from the tea chest. She beckoned me closer and, instead of passing me the towel, flung it over my head and vigorously tousled my hair. I was embarrassed at first, my head fiercely rumpled by Evangeline’s strong and competent hands. And no sooner had I begun to enjoy the warm, domineering rub-down than Evangeline whipped the towel away and declared me dry.

Kneeling by the door in mud-spattered trousers, I disembowelled my tool bag and selected a nail from the old tobacco tin. Striking the first hammer blow, I realized that the wood was very brittle and weak, and Grace could easily prise out the nails if she wanted (though I doubted she’d think of it). When the first bracket was secured, I took a little breather and asked Evangeline, who was standing, arms folded, a pace or two behind me, if she missed being a high-school teacher.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I have to look after Grace now, so I cannot go back to Kajang and teach English.’

‘What a pity,’ I said. ‘Who looked after Grace before?’

‘Our parents, but they are dead now.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

At a loss for what else to say I resumed the lock fitting. When I finished I showed Evangeline how to work the padlock and gave her two copies of the key. Evangeline thanked me and offered me a cup of water, which she poured from the lukewarm kettle. We stood awkwardly together as I took a copper-tasting sip. The austerity of the hut was troubling. There was no shrine or joss-sticks or knick-knacks to make the place look like home.

‘Do you like to read, Evangeline?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Resettlement Officer Dulwich has a terrific library in his bungalow. Austen, Conrad, Dickens … I can lay my hands on anything you want.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Evangeline. ‘I don’t want to read any of those books.’

Those books
… Her tone of voice was as if I’d suggested pornography. Babbling softly, Grace crawled off her beer crate and on to the bamboo matting. She yawned, revealing the stumpy teeth in her gums, and tilted her head to gaze ponderously at her sister and me.

‘How old is Grace?’ I asked.

‘Twenty-three.’

‘What’s wrong with her? If you don’t mind my asking …’

‘She drowned when she was a child. She died, then came back to life, but came back brain-damaged.’

‘You must have your work cut out caring for her. She seems to demand your constant attention …’

Evangeline sighed and rubbed a dog-eared corner of her eye. ‘Sometimes she’s demanding, sometimes peaceful like this,’ she said. ‘She was worse when she was younger.’

We were quiet for a moment. The percussion of rain on the zinc roof made it seem as though we were inside a kettledrum. Grace continued to gaze at us as she lay on the bamboo matting. She bent her legs, the pale scar on her knee like a little caterpillar wriggling to her shin. By then I’d heard of Grace’s infamous promiscuity, but there was nothing ‘come-hither’ about her lack of modesty. She moved unconsciously, her limbs seeking a more comfortable arrangement in the sticky heat. I never understood how men could take advantage of her the way they did. Though she encouraged her defilement,
Grace
had the mind of a child. And there is something very wrong with the conquest of an infant.

‘Does anyone ever help you with Grace?’

‘The Jesus People take her when I help the Red Cross.’

‘Are you and Grace Christians?’

‘No.’

‘But you have Christian names.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have Chinese names too?’

‘No.’

‘That’s unusual.’

‘Yes.’

I lifted the cup to my lips and found it dry. Everything about Evangeline, from her reticence to her barricaded arms, made me feel unwelcome. It occurred to me that she hadn’t even bothered to thank me for the night I’d rushed to the police hut to help her. The rain had slowed to a feeble pit-a-pat-pat and children ran out of a neighbouring hut, screaming after the morning cooped up indoors. I told Evangeline that I had to leave for tiffin. I told her that I was too busy to help in the medical hut that week, and would she pass on my regards to the Aussie nurses? Evangeline nodded, relieved, and I gathered up my tools and left.

As the sun made its debut in the sky I was glad to be outside, away from strange Evangeline and the smoke-hued fascination of her eyes. I splashed in puddles and hoped that Winston Lau wasn’t dishing up fish-head curry for tiffin again.

* * *

Due to the coercive nature of the Briggs Plan, the Chinese community were very hostile to it. The belief that New Villages existed under police dictatorship was widespread, as was the misconception that the Chinese community were being persecuted by the British, as they had been persecuted by the Japanese during the Occupation. Such attitudes were unhelpful in the war against Communism.

The government wanted the Chinese to play a more active role in their liberation. They wanted to show that the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, as advocated by the Reds, was nothing more than the dictatorship of the Malayan Communist Party central committee. The government wanted to give the Chinese what the Communists were out to deny them: democracy.